BBC World Service Annual Antarctic Midwinter Broadcast: June 21, 2024

COURTESY BAS

A live, off-air, half-hour recording of the BBC World Service special Antarctic Midwinter Broadcast on 21 June 2024 beginning at 21:30 UTC. The broadcast, hosted by Cerys Matthews, featured messages and music for the 47 members of the staff of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) overwintering in Antarctica at the Rothera (Antarctic Peninsula) and King Edward Point and Bird Island (South Georgia) research stations. In addition to personal messages from family and friends, there were interviews with Professor Dame Jane Francis, Director of BAS; Olivier Hubert, a former chef at Rothera and the Halley VI research station; and Nadine Frontier, a marine biologist at King Edward Point; and Allie Clement, an ocean scientist at Rothera. The transmitter came on the air with a test tone (1108 Hz plus harmonics) about a minute before the program started. As sometimes happens, the first few words of the introduction were missed.

The recording is of the transmission on 11685 kHz from the BBC's Woofferton, England, transmitting station. The sender had a registered power of 300 kW with antenna beam 182 degrees. The transmission was received on a Belka-DX receiver with a Tecsun AN-03L 7-metre wire antenna outdoors in Hanwell (just outside Fredericton), New Brunswick, Canada, in pseudo-synchronous (AM2) mode with 50 Hz - 2.7 kHz bandwidth. Reception was quite good with little noise or fading and very good signal strength. The additional parallel frequencies of 9585 kHz from Woofferton and 9870 kHz from Ascension were heard but not as well as 11685 kHz. There was a break in transmission at about the 21-minute mark in the recording for approximately one minute. A studio quality, slightly longer, podcast version is available on the BBC World Service website.